Research

(July 31, 2019) Happy new year Art Play Children Learning followers! I hope you have all had a wonderful break. 2020 is well underway for all of us and if you are like me, you will have lots of hopes and ambitions for the year ahead. Sometimes these can be exciting and sometimes these can make one feel overwhelmed. My attitude is to always try to do my best to keep one foot moving in front of the other, even if they are just little steps and always stay open to the unexpected

I have spent the past 4 four years doing my PhD full-time. Day after day. Week after week. Slogging it out on a quest to create new knowledge that advances society. This experience has been exhausting, exciting, intellectually arduous and of course, deeply fulfilling. I mark the completion of the PhD as the moment I passed the viva, which is a final oral examination you do in the United Kingdom at the end of the program. The viva basically involves two academics, who are spec

(January 3, 2018) This post discusses the symposium presentation ‘Material play: children’s learning with new, found and recycled ‘stuff’ given by Professor Pat Thomson, Nina Odegard and Louisa Penfold at the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) in Canberra, Australia. Image: Bradley Cummings On November 27, 2017 Professor Pat Thomson (University of Nottingham), Nina Odegard (University College of Oslo and Akershus) and myself (University of Nottingham) gav

(October 30, 2017) In this post I consider the gap between academics/non-academics in children’s art education. A contestable claim but something I believe is worthy of further discussion. I reflect upon my experience of moving from working as a full-time learning curator in an art museum to full-time PhD researcher and what I have learnt along the way. Before starting my PhD, I thought I knew a reasonable amount about early childhood education theory. I had studied an array

(August 2, 2017) This post reports on the ‘Space, materials, the body: Researching young children’s experiences in museums’ symposium held at Manchester Metropolitan University on May 23, 2017. Photo pinched from: underfivesinmuseums.com I almost did not write this post. I didn’t have the mental capacity to do it immediately after the event and now several months have gone by and it seems outdated. However, the ‘Space, materials, the body: Researching young children’s experie

(October 10, 2016) This is a repost from the Centre for Research in Arts, Creativity and Literacies (CRACL) blog. The original post was written by Pat Thomson, Professor of Education within the School of Education, University of Nottingham (UK). We have been conducting an evaluation of learning in the Serpentine’s World without Walls programme. We have just reported on our interim results from an examination of two projects. One was the first instalment of Changing Play, a pr

(February 5, 2016) Late last year I attended and presented at the 2015 ‘Engage’ conference in Glasgow, Scotland. The conference theme was focused on young people’s programs and partnerships with art galleries. You can read my reflections from the conference on the Centre for Research in Arts, Creativity and Literacies blog here.